Issue #5

PRODUCT

Business workflow software is still pretty lame. Noah gets at some of the reasons why: as more seasoned software users we expect the kind of polish and data visibility we get with our personal apps. But most importantly, enterprise software generally lacks really useful, niche-specific context cues that make the workflow more timely & simple. It's why we insist on taking the time to deeply understand how users actually accomplish tasks & what changes could help them.

Build a little, use it a lot. Learn. Do that loop again. That's what Tantek Çelik and his IndieWeb working group have been doing as they try to develop open alternative to social media silos. This week, he went even farther with his dogfooding experiments and shifted back more radically to only sites under his own permanent control.

DESIGN

Yet another way to finally learn flexbox. What makes this one better? How about 20 free video courses?! Wes Bos makes these tutorials super accessible by breaksing up the flexbox style minutia into easy to digest snippets, while supplying some real-life use cases.

DEVELOPMENT

We have no idea who this mystery engineer is, but this person in running around locating and replacing inefficient algorithms that have been overlooked in popular open source projects. Our hats are off to you, secret guardian of algorithmic complexity. Get inspired inspired by this post, and read the whole blog to level up in profiling and algorithms.

We can't say we're especially surprised that one of the worst classes in the JavaScript API is responsible for such shenanigans. Be extra vigilant when using Date parsing. Or just let Moment.js handle it and save yourself some pain.